Cheap and easy Sleep improvement

Cheap and easy Sleep improvement

June 28, 2019 1 By Stuart
problems sleeping

Sleep. We all want it but most of us never seem to get enough. There’s hundreds of sleep tips over the internet, and I’ve read enough books on sleep to build a bed from.

I’ve never been a great sleeper but had gotten used to pushing through with caffeine and a grumpy demeanor. But pushing my running on a bit this lack of sleep wasn’t helping, even with trying the 80/20 method. It was harder to wake up in the morning, harder to put in a long evening run, and with age I just wasn’t recovering properly.

So which one of all those sleep tips was I going to try out first?

Most of the sleep advice recommends working on your sleeping environment. We’ve got a decent bed that’s less than 3 years old, nice soft clean sheets and we keep the room at a decent temperature.

The next thing up on the list was to sort out the light coming in to the room. We’ve got decent curtains but they do let bright light through, and the house faces down a road so we can get the odd headlight shining through at random times of the night

Black out curtains would be a good option, but they’re expensive and with the way our current curtains are hung we wouldn’t get a good seal without boxing them in. And as our 2 resident furballs are quite keen on sitting on the windowsill, nice expensive black out blind would probably end up shredded quickly

So the cheap option was to look into sleep masks. I’ve tried the free airline ones over the years. Unfortunately I’ve been blessed/cursed with nice long eyelashes so they’re never comfortable unless I’m desperate on a flight

The product

Luckily there seems to be a spate of domed eye masks released onto the market that looked just the job. A bit of searching on ebay turned up these:

The PaiTree sleep mash

The Paitree sleep mask. From the ad it looked like there’d be enough room for my eyelashes, claim to be washable and durable, which is great as I don’t like buying things that won’t last.

In use

They turned up pretty quickly. The material felt nice and soft, and they seemed to have been put together pretty well. Plenty of room for my eyelashes. The slight excess of fabric around the nose really sealed the light out from that area.

Overnight they’re really comfortable, not too tight, not too hot and soft enough not to notice. Once adjusted they stayed in place nicely despite me being a bit of a fidgety face down sleeper.

The complete darkness has helped with sleeping. As soon as they’re on it’s pitch black and stays that way. So no more waking up when a car comes along or Mrs BeestonRunner gets up and puts the light on

Another unexpected sleep bonus is that if I do wake up mid sleep then I don’t know what time it is. And with a little bit of will power I won’t look at my watch to check the time. This has meant I’m not fretting over how long I’ve been asleep or how long I’ve been awak. None of this ‘oh no, only an hour since I dropped off’ or “Damn, it’s 04:00, I’m never going back to sleep now’. This keeps me relaxed and makes it easier to fall asleep again, or just to relax

With the eye mask and a couple of other changes I’m made to my sleep routine I think I’ve definitely improved my sleep pattern over the last couple of months. For £8 this sleep mask has made a huge difference and I’m completely sold on the idea now. Just need to make sure I’ve got a spare

Credits

Article image is Insomnia by N-Maulina